Incorporating broadband durability in measuring geographic access to health care in the era of telehealth: A case example of the 2-step virtual catchment area (2SVCA) Method
Abstract The COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic has expanded telehealth utilization in unprecedented ways and has important implications for measuring geographic access to healthcare services. Established measures of geographic access to care have focused on the spatial impedance of patien...
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Published in | Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA Vol. 28; no. 11; pp. 2526 - 2530 |
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Main Authors | , , , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
Oxford University Press
01.11.2021
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Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | Abstract
The COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic has expanded telehealth utilization in unprecedented ways and has important implications for measuring geographic access to healthcare services. Established measures of geographic access to care have focused on the spatial impedance of patients in seeking health care that pertains to specific transportation modes and do not account for the underlying broadband network that supports telemedicine and e-health. To be able to measure the impact of telehealth on healthcare access, we created a pilot augmentation of existing methods to incorporate measures of broadband accessibility to measure geographic access to telehealth. A reliable measure of telehealth accessibility is important to enable policy analysts to assess whether the increasing prevalence of telehealth may help alleviate the disparities in healthcare access in rural areas and for disadvantaged populations, or exacerbate the existing gaps as they experience “double burdens.” |
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Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 |
ISSN: | 1527-974X 1067-5027 1527-974X |
DOI: | 10.1093/jamia/ocab149 |